Latest news with #FrenchTouch
Times
17 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Times
Daft Punk and French house music deserve heritage status, says Macron
President Macron has called for the work of Daft Punk and other pioneers of the French electronic dance music scene to be enshrined on Unesco's register of world heritage. The funk and disco-influenced electro music known as French Touch, which emerged from the Paris club scene in the 1990s, deserves to be recognised by the UN's cultural arm as one of the 'intangible' assets it deems significant for humanity, Macron said. The president has already succeeded in having the baguette and Alpine mountain climbing elevated to the Unesco list. Musical genres already on the list include Jamaican reggae, Irish harp music, Inuit drumming and the Cuban bolero. In a radio interview at the weekend to mark France's annual Fête de la musique, Macron noted that Germany's branch of Unesco had added Berlin's 1980s techno music and dance to its national list in 2023 — although the international agency has not yet accepted it. The French 1990s version, also associated with Air and the DJs Bob Sinclar and David Guetta, was just as worthy as Germany's, Macron said. 'We're going to do that too. I love Germany — you know how pro-European I am. But we don't have to take lessons from anyone. We are the inventors of electro. We have that French Touch,' Macron told Radio Fréquence Gaie. While Macron, a pianist, is mainly known as a lover of classical music, his wife Brigitte favours French rock, electro and hip hop and recently invited performers to the Elysée Palace. On Friday night, as part of the Fête de la musique — an outdoor celebration that encourages amateurs to perform — hundreds of presidential guests danced in the palace gardens to the Avener, a deep house and electro DJ and music producer from Nice. The Avener, whose real name is Tristan Casara, closed a night that included performances by a folk orchestra from Condom, a town in southwest France, and a French-Caribbean group called Kassav'. The term 'French Touch' emerged in Paris in the early 1990s and gained international recognition later in the decade following landmark releases such as Daft Punk's 1997 album Homework and Stardust's 1998 hit Music Sounds Better with You. French Touch, which employs filter and phaser effects applied to repetitive samples from the disco era, influenced artists beyond France — including Madonna, who incorporated its sound into her 2005 album Confessions on a Dance Floor. • Spinning around: how I became a rave DJ — at 51 The genre was given prominence during the ceremonies at last year's Paris Olympic Games. At the closing ceremony, Phoenix, Air, and Kavinsky all played tracks spanning two decades of their catalogues. The Macrons' promotion of contemporary musical genres has drawn criticism from right-wing and traditionalist circles, who were also unhappy with their prominence at the Olympics. The president's suggestions for Unesco drew attacks from the same sector on social media. François Asselineau, a rightwinger who stood as a 'Frexit candidate' in the 2017 presidential election, tweeted: 'World War Three is looming, France is on the edge of bankruptcy. What does Macron do? On Radio Fréquence Gaie, he announces that he wants to inscribe French Touch music on the Unesco world heritage list.' By Will Hodgkinson, Chief Pop Critic One imagines a collective cry of 'quelle horreur' emanating from the stuffier Paris arrondissements. The country of Édith Piaf, Serge Gainsbourg and other masters of chanson, honouring music designed for dancing to while in a state of advanced chemical refreshment? Those Gauls must be crazy. Actually, the Paris-based music boom of the 1990s is a movement that has taken a few decades to shine. Typified by repetitive, frequently suppressed beats, strong influences from classic funk, disco and even rock, and treated vocals that bring a mood of robotic dissonance, French Touch was a hugely innovative style that set the template for modern dance music. The prime movers were Daft Punk, aka Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo, teenagers in robot masks from Paris's smart 17th arrondissement. They combined a punky, DIY spirit with a bricolage approach that saw them take elements from deeply unfashionable artists — Jean-Michel Jarre, new age flute maestro Gheorghe Zamfir, even Barry Manilow was fair game — and incorporate them into their own sound. These days, a rewriting of pop's taste rules is commonplace. Back in the Nineties, it was revolutionary. That is a key aspect of French Touch: eclecticism. Sébastien Tellier brought symphonic classicism to the dance floor with his 2004 classic La Ritournelle, Justice are a pair of DJs who would rather have been rock stars. Cassius took influence from American hip-hop. Air made the gentlest dance music imaginable on their 1998 easy listening masterpiece Moon Safari. French Touch formed during a period in the early Nineties when most of the key players lived in or around Montmartre, had little money, and felt they were missing out on the more vibrant nightclub culture of London, Berlin and New York. Perhaps that's why they weren't subject to the conformity of taste that tends to beset fashionable scenes, and why they forged an ambition to represent France, dismissed for so long by the British as a musical disaster zone, on the world stage. The result was a sound that shaped dance music — and deserves to be recognised as a phenomenon of cultural and historic significance.
France 24
26-05-2025
- Entertainment
- France 24
Music Show: Kids Return pays homage to French Touch and Britpop with ‘1997'
12:36 From the show In this edition of our arts24 music show, Jennifer Ben Brahim chats with Adrien Rozé and Clément Savoye from French pop rock band Kids Return. Despite being born and raised in Paris, they could be mistaken for being from the UK or the US, their musical references being the likes of Oasis and The Strokes. They've just dropped their second album '1997', a nod to their year of birth but also two musical movements that started that year – French Touch and Britpop. Kids Return have just finished a North American tour, performing in locations such as the Red Rocks Amphitheatre in Colorado. This month, they performed at the legendary Olympia venue in Paris, following in the footsteps of some of their musical idols such as The Beatles.
